Developing with a Surface Pro 2

After thoroughly enjoying my original Surface Pro I decided to upgrade to a Surface Pro 2 (256GB) as my main machine (both for coding and non coding). The main aim of the upgrade was to get the 8G RAM as opposed to the Pro 1’s 4G limit.

Wow… simply, wow!

Given that spend virtually all my time in Visual Studio (which can certainly be a memory/CPU hog at times), it was going to be the make-or-break application for the Surface. If it ran badly, no Surface work for me. Fortunately the machine doesn’t skip a beat. Yes, it doesn’t compile my projects as quickly as an 3Ghz i7 with 32G of RAM, but I really really don’t care about that. My main project at work is a touch under 100k lines of C# ( and a bazillion lines of JS), and it cleans and rebuilds in around 26 seconds. Given I don’t normally completely clean and rebuild every single time I compile (usually I just hit F6 for a “build”) my compile times are practically 8 seconds. I can definitely live with that. So that’s a tick for being able to handle day to day workloads.

My usual workload on the Surface Pro 2 is Windows 8.1 Pro (Update 1), Visual Studio 2013, SQL Server 2012, IIS Express, SSMS, Skype for Desktop, iTunes, Sublime Text, Evernote, many powershell/command prompts, SourceTree, Github for Windows and anywhere between 5 and 100 Chrome tabs. Although I’d call myself “slightly OCD” when it comes to monitoring memory usage, I’m very happy with how things are running. Currently I’ve a system commit of around 5.4G with physical memory usage at 4.5G. Plenty of room for VS to expand and consume (all). The single biggest jump in SC and PM will happen once I start debugging the main project in VS, then the private bytes jump to almost 1G, but hey that’s a developers life….

I’ve had plenty of 8G and 16G RAM based machines previously (hell even a 32G at one stage) but I’m still consistently surprised by how much this “mere tablet/ultrabook” gets done. As for a general purpose development machine I can’t really fault it.

It’s compact, works great with USB based docking stations, speedy (enough) and handles all work loads that I throw at it.

but…

Although a fan of the kick stand at the beginning I have to start admitting that on a train (where I am currently) it’s not the most comfortable thing to use. Still, I mainly use it at a desk so it’s not a big problem.